Have an App? Google Has Analytics for That

From shopping to social media, businesses are creating mobile apps for just about anything you can imagine. Search giant Google is betting that companies will want to track performance statistics for their apps just as they already do for their websites, with tools like Google Analytics.

Today, Google is announcing Mobile App Analytics, a new set of free reports that can help marketers and app developers better measure their apps.

"It's no longer enough to track just the number of downloads or new users an app has," says JaiJing Wang, a product manager at Google Analytics. With Mobile App Analytics, users can dig deeper into an app's performance, with stats on in-app sales and purchases, as well as insights on how customers are using them.

For example, new acquisition reports can show the number of new and active users and can track traffic sources and the distribution of users over newer and older versions, Google says. Engagement reports can track how frequently people use an app and how they navigate through it, and outcome reports allow app makers to track goals such as sales or ad clicks.

Mobile App Analytics will roll out to users who sign up for it "in waves" and should be available to all users by the end of the summer. It will be available for Android as well as Apple iOs apps, Google says.